Legislators propose K-12 education cuts, spending from savings

Posted 1/26/17

Bills on K-12 public school funding have been introduced in the Wyoming House and Senate to address an estimated $400 million annual shortfall.

On Monday night, the House Education Committee voted to sponsor a broad proposal for representatives …

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Legislators propose K-12 education cuts, spending from savings

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CHEYENNE (AP) — The first comprehensive proposals to address Wyoming’s school funding crisis include freezing spending on special education and student transportation costs, dipping heavily into savings, tapping state severance tax collections, increasing class sizes and possibly raising the sales tax.

Bills on K-12 public school funding have been introduced in the Wyoming House and Senate to address an estimated $400 million annual shortfall.

On Monday night, the House Education Committee voted to sponsor a broad proposal for representatives to consider.

“What it did is, it modifies the funding model we have now,” said Rep. David Northrup, R-Powell, chairman of the House Education Committee.

It’s too early to tell what the proposals mean for local schools, Kevin Mitchell, superintendent of Park County School District No. 1, said Tuesday.

“We’re just waiting to see how things shake out,” said Mitchell, who was in Cheyenne this week. He said he’s looking forward to hearing legislators’ discussion on the floor on the proposals.

The bill was referred to the House Education Committee Wednesday; the committee is requesting public comments on the legislation through Feb. 6. Comments can be submitted online at http://tinyurl.com/HB0236.

If the House bill becomes law, the state’s $1.6 billion rainy day fund would transfer $100 million into the main public school funding account on June 30 of each fiscal year, provided the rainy day fund has more than $500 million. The rainy day fund is available to use for any state funding purpose.

The bill proposes a 0.5 percent sales tax increase if the rainy day fund drops below $500 million. Revenue from that statewide tax increase would go to the school funding account. The sales tax hike will disappear if property tax collections are adequate.

“If we decide to put taxes on, the taxes will be on a trigger,” Northrup told local school board leaders last month. “If money starts coming back in, the tax burden to the public needs to be relieved.”

The proposal also calls for diverting a 1 percent severance tax on mineral extraction for the 2019 through 2022 fiscal years into the general fund, and then into the primary school funding account. That 1 percent amounts to about $89.1 million annually.

Freezes and cuts

Currently, the state pays 100 percent of student transportation and special education costs. The House proposal calls for freezing funding at the amount spent this school year, meaning local school districts would have to cover any additional expenses in those programs.

At a meeting with local legislators in December, Meeteetse Schools Superintendent Jay Curtis said the move to freeze special education funding could significantly impact the small school district.

“When you have a student move into the district who is a high-needs student, you have a legal obligation to serve that child and provide sometimes very costly services,” Curtis said.

He said the district doesn’t necessarily have the flexibility in its budget to absorb those types of additional expenses.

“I can tell you we’re pretty lean in Meeteetse, and if we had a student move in right now that needed a tremendous amount of services, we don’t have the people to do it — we would surely need the state to help us out,” Curtis said.

Sen. Hank Coe, R-Cody, said Wyoming is the only state in the country that reimburses 100 percent for special education.

Freezing current special education funding would save an estimated $9.2 million in the next fiscal year.

A freeze on transportation funding — which pays for busing all students — would save $3.1 million in fiscal year 2019.

Other provisions in the House bill include a moratorium on alternative schools — which are established and administered separately from public schools to give parents and students other education options — until at least 2019. It also calls for a 10 percent reduction in the current base salaries of superintendents, assistant superintendents and business managers, starting in fiscal year 2018-19.

The bill also proposes reducing the number of required school days from 185 to 180. Reducing school days saves money by reducing teachers’ salaries — a move Powell and Cody superintendents oppose.

“I would be real leery of cutting someone’s salary,” said Ray Schulte, Cody school district superintendent, during last month’s meeting with legislators. “I think we would get a tremendous amount of pushback on that. I think people would be furious.”

“We will not reduce teacher salaries,” Mitchell said last month. He added that it would negatively affect morale.

Mitchell said Tuesday that the district would “have to find those cuts somewhere else, and it will probably be related to personnel.”

He said the Legislative Service Office is working on a breakdown of how the House proposal will affect local school districts.

The Senate proposal targets transportation and special education funding, too. That proposal also calls for increases in class sizes — boosting kindergarten class sizes to 19 students by 2019. Class sizes for grades six-12 would increase to 24 students by 2019.

The Senate bill would save the state more than $37 million next year, nearly $67 million the following year and more than $62 million in fiscal year 2020, according to the Legislative Service Office.

Wyoming’s K-12 education system has largely been funded by taxes on the fossil fuel industry, which has seen a sharp downturn in the last several years and a corresponding drop in state revenues.

“The magnitude of it and the suddenness of it ... it’s huge,” said Senate President Eli Bebout, who co-sponsored the Senate bill. “But the good news is, we’ve prepared ourselves better than we have in the past. It just happened so quickly and so severely ... I don’t think any of us anticipated a decline of this magnitude.”

The state has also seen a sharp reduction in payments from federal coal leases that officials used to fund billions of dollars in school construction and maintenance.

“If you consider $3 billion worth of school construction that had been funded through that process — in most of your communities, you have brand-new schools and you’re proud of those and they look good,” Mary Kay Hill, policy director for Gov. Matt Mead, said Friday. “There’s not a nickel to build new schools once we leave this biennium.”

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